Huawei Helps Tianjin Binhai Rural Commercial Bank Launch Next-Gen Digital Core System

New Core System Anchors High-Quality Banking Growth

As mobile finance, open banking, and intelligent services rapidly evolve, banks' core systems are no longer just behind-the-scenes processing tools. They have become platforms for business innovation. Digital finance has become a critical enabler for financial institutions to serve the real economy and enhance their core competitiveness. Bank services are expanding from traditional counters to mobile finance, open banking, and industrial internet scenarios. However, traditional core systems are increasingly struggling to keep up with today's demand for business agility, data intelligence, scalability, and high availability.

Next-generation core systems serve as the digital foundation for modern banking, powering business innovation, data operations, risk management, and intelligent services. BRCB has accordingly built a new digital core system to upgrade its business models and lay a solid foundation for high-quality future growth.

Two Decades of Local Expertise Guides Banking Digital Journey

Tianjin Binhai Rural Commercial Bank Co., Ltd. is one of the four municipal incorporated banks in Tianjin. Established on December 24, 2007, it was formed through the restructuring of the former Tanggu Rural Cooperative Bank, Dagang Rural Cooperative Bank, and Hangu Rural Credit Cooperative Union. It is China's first commercial bank with its headquarters located in the Tianjin Binhai New Area.

After over two decades, the bank has emerged as a top-tier regional player among Chinese rural commercial banks. By the end of 2025, its total assets exceeded CNY300 billion, while annual revenue for 2025 climbed to CNY4.685 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17.63%. The bank has consistently earned a spot among The Banker's Top 1000 World Banks for several years, currently ranking 13th among Chinese rural commercial banks. With 107 branches, its footprint spans all of Tianjin and extends into Xinjiang and Zhejiang.

In digital finance, BRCB clearly defines its market position: rooted in Binhai, driving regional expansion, and reaching out along the Belt and Road. The bank is speeding up its transition into a regional joint-stock commercial bank with modern governance, distinct business strengths, robust risk control, and comprehensive services. Digitalization is no longer just back-office support, but a key engine driving business innovation, management changes, and operational upgrades.

New Core Project Reshapes the Digital Foundation for Future Banking

Building a bank for the future requires an evolving digital capability framework. As China's first project to deploy Huawei's full-stack solution across infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and GaussDB, BRCB's new core project marks a major milestone. Launched in March 2024, the project took two years from platform setup to cloud-based application delivery. Leveraging its extensive experience in the financial industry, Huawei worked with BRCB to build a full-lifecycle capability framework spanning digital infrastructure, cloud and database platforms, integrated R&D, and project assurance.

Full-stack Huawei foundation, one-stop delivery

• IaaS layer: Powered by Huawei Cloud Stack (HCS), the bank built a highly reliable computing resource pool, enterprise-wide storage platform, and high-speed data center network, seamlessly integrating computing, storage, network, and security.

• PaaS layer: Using distributed technical components like the cloud service engine (CSE), distributed cache service (DCS), message queue service (MQS), and application programming interface (API) gateways, the bank built an open, agile, and evolvable technical platform. The platform supports microservice architecture, container deployment, and automated operations & maintenance (O&M). By developing capabilities as services, Huawei helps the bank rapidly combine business features into product offerings, cutting product rollout time from months down to weeks.

• Database layer: Distributed GaussDB is used for the core system. An innovative "one primary/standby cluster + mirror database + emergency database" architecture guarantees system accuracy as well as business continuity and consistency. Centralized GaussDB is used for counter and general ledger systems, providing unified management and O&M.

• R&D platform layer: Built on Huawei CodeArts, a one-stop DevOps platform manages everything from project management and code hosting to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, unifying development standards and boosting deployment efficiency 10-fold.

Shared business platforms, reusable capabilities

Building on its core business and counter channel platforms, the bank established eight business capability centers—Customer, Product, Account, Pricing, Accounting, Operations, Limits, and Parameters—turning core capabilities into standardized, reusable, and service-based assets. Today, over 80% of routine business needs can be fulfilled through simple configuration, eliminating the need for custom coding.

Smooth rollout, first-time success

This project covers one cloud platform, three new systems (core, counter, and general ledger), and four peripheral applications, while involving adaptation for 68 off-cloud systems. Following industry best practices, the project team completed multiple system verifications and go-live drills, and established a comprehensive risk control and rollback mechanism. At the end of April 2026, with the joint support of all parties involved, a total of 927 go-live commands were executed, and the new core system was officially launched and running smoothly within 46 hours. The system has had zero business downtime, zero customer impact, and zero data errors.

From System to Capability Upgrade: Unlocking Full Digital Value

For BRCB, the real value of the new core project lies in the digital capability framework that will fuel growth for years to come. The new core significantly enhances business processing capacity, laying a rock-solid foundation for high-concurrency transactions, real-time services, and future AI applications.

Boosted performance, elevated experience

Peak online processing capacity increased from 200 transactions per second (TPS) to over 4,000 TPS, a 20-fold improvement. End-of-day batch processing time was reduced from 60 minutes to 26 minutes, doubling the efficiency. System availability reached 99.999%, supporting automatic switchover within seconds without manual intervention.

Agile services, accelerated innovation

The time to launch a new product was reduced from 3–6 months to 1–2 weeks, and minor updates can go live within days. More than 10 systems were integrated into a one-stop workflow, reducing counter transaction steps by 50% and per-transaction processing time from 8 minutes to 3 minutes, cutting customer waiting time by 60%.

Intelligent O&M, multiplied efficiency

An integrated O&M platform now monitors full-stack operations and full-link traces, achieving over 90% automation in O&M and significantly improving the fault demarcation and location efficiency. Automated CI/CD pipelines boosted deployment efficiency 10-fold.

Precision accounting, refined management

The bank implemented a single-ledger management approach, achieving multidimensional cost accounting and profitability analysis, and enabling more timely and accurate financial decision-making.

AI-ready Infrastructure: Co-Creating the Future of Intelligent Banking

In the intelligent world, the new core system will serve as critical infrastructure that connects data, services, and intelligent capabilities, to support agent applications, real-time decisions, and autonomous operations. Backed by this robust foundation, BRCB will drive cloud adoption, data enablement, and AI innovation across all business lines. This will embed AI deeply within daily office work, customer service, and risk management, building an intelligent, compliant, and value-driven bank.

Industry Benchmark: A Replicable Practice for Core Transformation

The success of BRCB's digital core project validates the maturity and reliability of Huawei's Full-Stack Digital Core Solution. More importantly, it creates a replicable core transformation model that offers actionable references for other commercial banks.

The end-to-end modernization journey, from architecture planning and technology selection to system building, verification, and cutover, is now highly mature. These proven capabilities can be quickly assembled and adapted to core migration scenarios for banks of all sizes.

For Huawei, this project is not just about system launch, but a landmark joint practice in advancing digital transformation in the financial industry. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue leveraging its digital infrastructure, cloud computing, database, and AI capabilities to deepen its partnership with BRCB, exploring new architectures, business models, and capabilities for intelligent banking.